Macrium Reflect. Something Odd I Noticed.

I have 5 images created by Macrium. 1 Full, and 4 incremental.

With Macrium fully installed and up to date.

I decided to try another Imaging Software, I try lots of software, since I have my BU Images.

So I uninstalled Macrium, did a search of C: with Directory Opus, and deleted all files related to Macrium, did the same in Regedit.

I installed the new Image software, rebooted, made a new image, put it in a new folder on D:

I then decided to restore my previous image, with Macrium installed on it. I used my Macrium boot USB 3.0, like always.... Restores are usually 30 seconds to 2 and 1 half minutes (150 seconds).

BUT NOW, restoring am image that I have restored many times before, but never with macrium uninstalled, using the same boot medium (USB) it took 14 minutes !!!!

I thought this was very unusual, and tried this scenario 3 x...You wouldn't think there would be any difference, since the PC / C: isn't even booting.

 

See Aomei. I wanted to try it and also UBDR Gold Workstation Edition

 

No conflicts here, Win 7.

 

Conflicts?? What Conflicts. This has nothing to do with conflicts....Please read again.

 

Wanted to try Veritas also.

They have a 60 day trial......https://www.veritas.com/product/backup-and-recovery/system-recovery

 

Maybe it previously did a delta restore by comparing the MFTs of the backup and live system, and this time is did a full restore. Perhaps the new backup software modified something on the disk which prompted Reflect to do it differently.

 

If the Partition ID# (not the Windows drive letter) was changed by the new software, that's exactly what would happen.

 

I agree with TheRollbackFrog that something must have changed on the disk/partition that caused Reflect to decide that it couldn't use its Rapid Delta Restore mode and therefore it wrote out the entire partition during the restore instead. The fact that Reflect wasn't installed at the time of the restore wouldn't have had anything to do with it. Macrium doesn't go into a lot of detail about the exact conditions required for RDR to be used, possibly because it would help competitors figure out how they're doing what they're doing. All I've seen written is that RDR requires that Reflect be restoring to the same NTFS partition that the image was originally captured from and that the target partition still be at least as large as it was when the image was captured, but there's undoubtedly more to it than that.